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Professor James MacGregor Smith of the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Department and his former Ph.D. student, Alexander Stepanov, now a GIS analyst with Campus Planning, won the best paper award in the theory and methodology category at the 25th European Conference on Operational Research, held in Vilnius, Lithuania. EURO presented the first of its annual best paper awards for papers published in the European Journal of Operational Research. Smith and Stepanov’s paper, “Multi-objective evacuation routing in transportation networks,” was published in October 2009.

Frank Sup and colleagues in the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering (MIE) Department have lined up six sponsors for his Senior Capstone Design Course to support the MIE educational process and provide fascinating design projects for six of the 11 teams in the course. The projects range from optimizing solar arrays to creating a new energy-saving door for large, inflatable, U.S. Army tents.

Hyperion Systems LLC, an Amherst company which designs, manufactures, and markets an innovative (patent pending) photovoltaic system designed to keep farmland in production while generating solar energy, will continue its history of collaboration with UMass Amherst by sponsoring teams of students in the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Department for their senior design capstone projects.

Ninety-two participants representing 22 universities, eight commercial companies, and four government laboratories throughout North America gathered at UMass Amherst from August 7 to 9 for the inaugural meeting of the North American Wind Energy Academy (NAWEA). The newly formulated academy connects research institutions, universities, and industry.

Sandy (Alexander) Pollatsek, co-director of the Arbella Insurance Human Performance Lab, was one of two researchers in the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Department covered within a month by the prestigious and venerable Scientific American. As the article notes, “Pollatsek has been working with colleagues in the university's engineering school to systematically analyze the behavior of older drivers—including their visual scanning of the roads—and his evidence challenges the presumed connection between crashes and these well-known deficits.

Sandra Gross, Administrative Assistant for the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, and Pamela Rivest, Administrative Assistant for the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Department, have been chosen as the 2012 winners of the Dean’s Service Award.

The work of Anthony McCaffrey, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Center for e-Design (http://edesign.ecs.umass.edu) in the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Department, is highlighted in a Scientific American story about how rethinking labels can boost creativity. He says thinking about common items in terms of their component parts and decoupling their names from their uses opens up new ways of thinking and solving problems.

Ten College of Engineering students from the summer Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) will be participating in a joint poster session with the Institute for Cellular Engineering and the Collaborative Undergraduate Research in Engineering REU programs on Friday, July 27. The sophisticated research being carried out by our REU students ranges from preventing carcinogens in drinking water, to studying fluid dynamics in space, to creating a sturdy rotating base for CASA’s revolutionary phased array radar.

The University of Massachusetts Amherst Center for e-Design in the College of Engineering announced that it has received an in-kind software grant from Siemens PLM Software, a leading global provider of product lifecycle management (PLM) software and services, with a commercial value of nearly $2.3 million.